Chapter 72

The first time I drove Dad's car after the accident, it sounded like it was holding itself together out of sheer spite. The front corner still looked wrong, one headlight sat half an inch lower than the other, and the hood didn't close with quite the same smooth line it used to. But it ran. It coughed twice when I turned the key, grumbled as if offended, and then settled into a low, uneven vibration.

Dad had not liked the idea of me driving it. Still, he let me go because the alternative was Jack driving me everywhere, and even Dad seemed to understand that if I was going to return to some semblance of a normal life in Cold Creek, I needed at least the illusion that I could move through the town on my own.

The road was wet with thaw. It was early March, and snow still clung to the shadowed ditches and gathered in grey, shrinking heaps beneath the trees, but the open places had begun to soften into mud. Thin trickles of water ran along the edges of the asphalt, catching the first rays of the timid sunlight that crept its way from the east. Spring had not yet arrived, but it seemed to be lurking just around the corner.

My phone buzzed once on the passenger seat. I waited until the next curve passed before glancing down.

Nell. Clear for now.

That was all. Somehow, that made my heart beat faster than if she had written a whole paragraph. I knew Nell wasn't a fan of this arrangement, but she still had our backs. It made me feel all sorts of complicated things: regret that she was involved in this mess, respect and gratitude. I just hoped that if we were ever caught, she wouldn't be the one to take any of the blame.

I turned onto the old access road Ethan had described the night before, a narrow strip of gravel and packed dirt half-hidden behind young pines. It was close enough to the main road that if someone drove past at the wrong moment, they might see the turn, but far enough that once I pulled in, the trees swallowed the car almost immediately. I drove until the road dipped and curved behind a stand of firs. There I stopped, as instructed.

The engine ticked in the sudden quiet. For a few seconds, I only sat there, looking around. The forest stood around me in silence. Branches held drops of melted snow at their tips, each one sparkling for a second before falling. The last time I had walked into these woods, I had been bleeding, terrified, and not entirely sure whether I would come out again.

Forcing it out of my mind, I stepped outside, feeling the air bite my cheeks. Mud sucked lightly at my boots. I closed the car door, then hesitated and looked at the poor thing, dented and ridiculously out of place. I dragged two fallen pine branches from the edge of the ditch and leaned them loosely against the front, enough to cover it and keep it invisible from a distance. It would not fool anyone who came close, but it was still better than nothing.

"That is the worst camouflage I have ever seen."

I spun so fast my shoulder protested. Ethan stood between two trees on the far side of the road, half-hidden in shadow, his dark coat blending into the trunks behind him. If he hadn't spoken, I might not have seen him at all. One hand rested against the bark of a pine. His head was angled toward the road behind me, his attention still stretched past me, listening.

I pressed a hand to my chest. "Don't do that! You scared the hell out of me!"

His eyes flicked to my face. "Sorry." For a split second he looked like a kicked puppy. Despite everything, a laugh almost escaped me. It came out as breath instead. He, on the other hand, was dead serious.

He crossed to me only after looking once more down the road. His movements were quiet and controlled but not casual. He scanned the trees, the ruts in the mud, the slope behind the car. Then he stopped in front of me, close enough that warmth reached me through the cold air.

"Did anyone follow you?"

"I don't think so."

He looked at me. I sighed. "No. I took the road you told me. Nell texted. No one followed me."

Only then did his shoulders loosen by a fraction, his focus narrowing entirely onto me. A gust of wind swept by, setting the branches to the music of the forest. It hit me, once more throwing me back to that day in the woods, if only for a moment.

Ethan noticed immediately. "We don't have to do this today," he said quietly. "I understand if being here..." He looked around us, swallowing, "still bothers you."

I looked past him, toward the deeper dark green of the woods. Some wild part of me, the part that remembered hungry eyes and a foreign tongue on my skin, screamed at me to bolt. But another part of me looked at Ethan, standing with one foot already in his world and one hand held out toward mine, and knew that if I turned back now, I would ruin every chance to cross that bridge.

I shook my head. "No, I want to see it. I want to make new memories. Good ones. I know it won't erase what happened, but it will help me not to think of it every time I smell pine." I tried to put on a smile. "I want this. With you."

His eyes held mine for a long moment. Then he nodded, stretching out his palm. "Come. This way." He tugged gently when I put my hand in his.

The path, if it could be called that, barely existed: mud, pine needles, roots, old leaves flattened by snowmelt. I followed carefully, aware of every branch that brushed my coat.

***

The first steps were the hardest. The ground rose unevenly under layers of dead leaves, moss, pine needles and melting snow. Roots crossed the narrow track like knotted fingers. Wet branches leaned low enough to catch at my sleeves. But the difficulty was less in the walking and more in the simple fact of reentering the place that still haunted my nightmares.

Ethan seemed to know that too. His hold on my hand was firm enough to be reassuring, gentle enough that I could pull it back if I wanted to. His gait adjusted to my pace with such natural ease that it took me several minutes to realize he was doing it on purpose.

"Step left," he said quietly, nudging me left. I blinked, then looked down and saw a half-hidden root crossing the path exactly where my next step would have landed. "Oh."

A few yards later, before I had even registered anything in my way, he tugged my hand down. "Duck." I ducked just as a low branch slid over my head, bare twigs brushing the top of my hood. A minute later he nudged his chin toward the ground under us. "Careful, stone under the moss."

I gave him a sharp glance he didn't register, his focus turned elsewhere. We kept going, but after that I started paying attention differently because I realized that the forest Ethan moved through and the forest I moved through were not the same place. I saw trunks, mud, branches, patches of thawing snow, the dark wet shine of stones, the occasional fallen log. He seemed to see paths layered over paths, things that had moved before us, things hidden under the ground.

"There's a vole under that root," he said after a while, nodding toward the base of an old tree.

I stopped so quickly I almost tripped, but he kept me steady. "A what?"

"A vole."

I stared at the root, which looked like a root and nothing else. "How do you know?"

"I can hear it."

I narrowed my eyes. Of course he could. His head tipped slightly, listening more than looking. "It stopped moving when we came close."

I blinked because there was nothing else I could do. He smiled then, briefly and quietly, but real enough that it warmed something in me.

A little farther on, he pointed without breaking stride. "A rabbit passed there. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago."

I looked at the snow-soft mud near a patch of bramble and saw nothing. "You're making that up."

He scoffed, but a small laugh escaped him anyway. "I'm not."

"Oh, come on. How can you possibly know it was ten minutes ago?"

He released my hand and crouched beside the bramble. I found myself watching the movement with more fascination than dignity. He touched the edge of a bent reed, then the mud, then lifted his head slightly, scenting the air. "The track is soft but not filled with meltwater yet. The scent is still sharp, but not fresh enough that it is nearby. It went that way." He nodded deeper into the brush. "Fast, but it wasn't chased. A single scent. Probably heard your car coming up the road and fled."

I followed his gaze and saw, only after he had explained it, a narrow depression in the ground that might have been a path or might have been imagination.

"That's what you see all the time?"

He straightened and looked at me. His eyes glinted. He seemed awfully amused by my questions. "The forest speaks in layers. Most of the time I don't need to think about it. My body reads it and adjusts." He paused. "The only difference is that now I'm thinking about it consciously and trying to put it into words."

I thought of all the times he had corrected my steps before I noticed the danger, the way he guided me not by knowing a trail like a map, but by continuously translating what the forest was saying to him before I could hear it at all.

"You're translating it for me," I said softly.

His gaze held mine for a second. "Yes." He smiled, stretching out his hand. "Come on."

***

We walked on. The trees gradually thinned, and the sound of running water grew louder. The ground sloped downward, and when the underbrush finally opened, the forest gave way to a clearing so beautiful that I stopped on the edge of it without meaning to.

A stream crossed the space in a clean, silver line, cutting through the dark grass and thaw-soft moss. Snow still clung in small white patches along its banks, but the water had already freed itself, flashing over stones with the impatient energy of something that had waited all winter to move. Light fell differently there, brighter somehow, caught in the running water and broken into a thousand glittering pieces.

For one breath, I forgot that I was in a place I should fear.

"Is this it?" I asked.

Ethan shook his head. "No. We're still on Blackwell joint territory here."

I turned to look at him. "This is Blackwell?"

"Joint territory, but yes, the Blackwell side of it. Someone could still pass through here, especially once the snow is gone."

I looked around again, and the beauty of the clearing shifted slightly, as if it lost some of its innocence.

"Then the spring is farther?"

"Not much." His eyes moved over the clearing once, checking the treeline. "Past the rise. The forbidden ring begins beyond that line of rocks."

I followed where he indicated and found the rocks at last, barely visible beneath moss and last year's leaves, a low arc of half-sunken stones at the far end of the clearing. They hardly looked like a boundary to me.
But in Cold Creek the things that mattered most rarely announced themselves for what they were.

Beyond the rocks, the forest waited.